In my last post I took you through how I created a small portable media centre that I can easily take on holiday to hook up to the hotel TV.

To reduce the amount space it took up, I used a cheap USB keypad which could be used to control the media center. It worked really well & having something hard-wired meant I didn’t have to worry about a Bluetooth-paired device needing re-pairing.

However, what I then realised was it would be good to be able to use a spare remote control instead. I was using the OpenElec distribution and looked through their documentation for how to do this, but only found references to version 3 of the software (it’s on version 7) and how to get LIRC working with it. There were plenty of blog posts on hooking up IR support, but a lot of them were written 2-3 years ago, and the software has moved on somewhat.

Hardware Setup

What I did first was buy a suitable IR receiver. I chose the Vishay TSOP4838 (which costs less than £1) because of the voltage range (2.5-5.5v) and receiver frequency (38KHz). If you look at the datasheet for the product, you’ll see which pins should get wired up to the Pi;

Simply wire pin 1 to GPIO 18, pin 2 to GND, and pin 3 to a 3.3v power pin, e.g.

By using some short F-F jumper wires and a small cut in the side of the case, I was able to position the reciever neatly(ish) on the side.. it’s still easily removable, but you could integrate it into the case a bit more seamlessly than this ;)

Software Setup

Before this project I was using OpenElec, but had limited success getting the IR support working properly. I switched to OSMC which I’d read had better IR support through the main UI. I think I was actually on the right track with OpenElec, but I realised later that the old vintage Xbox remote I was trying to use wasn’t 100% working.

If you’re going to use a remote control that’s officially recognised, then you can jump this part about learning IR remote control codes.

Learning IR remote commands

The remote I found in the loft was an old DVD player remote which (unsurprisingly) wasn’t in the list of pre-recognised remotes in the OSMC installation. I needed to get the Pi to learn the IR pulses being sent out by the remote and map them to the Kodi functions.

1. First off, you need to telnet to the Pi. Username: osmc, Password: osmc.

2. Next you need to stop the LIRC service which is being locked/used by Kodi

sudo systemctl stop lircd_helper@lirc0

3. Now you can run the IR learn mode.. this will record what it finds to the config file you specify;

irrecord -d /dev/lirc0 /home/osmc/lircd.conf

4. Follow the on-screen instructions which will recognise your remote.

One observation I had was that this only worked properly if I stopped after the first prompt to press lots of keys on the remote.. if I completed the second stage, the key mapping didn’t work, e.g.

If I ignored the second phase & let it abort, the learn process worked

When it’s working, you’ll be able to enter the Kodi function (like KEY_UP, KEY_DOWN, etc) & map it to a key press on your remote;

Once you’ve mapped all the functions you want, we then need to move back to OSMC and tell it to use that config file we’ve just written.

OSMC Settings

In OSMC you need to do the following;

1. Disable the CEC service (via System Settings > Input > Peripherals > CEC Adapter), which seems to be needed for LIRC to work.

2. Now go into OSMC settings and pick the Raspberry Pi icon

3. Go into Hardware Support and enabled LIRC GPIO Support. You shouldn’t need to change anything if you connected the sensor to GPIO 18.

4. Now go back and select the Remote Control option.

5. Ignore the list of pre-installed remotes and select Browse;

6. Navigate to the folder where LIRC wrote your config file;

7. Confirm the change & reboot the box;

That should be it.. your remote should be able to control everything in Kodi.

We recently went on holiday and I took my laptop & VGA cable with me. It was my intention to hook it up to the TV and play some media on it to keep the kids happy on rainy days. However, It turned out the TV had the VGA port covered up by the wall mounting bracket, and my laptop doesn’t have HDMI.. so we ended up putting the laptop on a chair and watching videos from there; it did the job, but wasn’t ideal.

At home we have a Fire TV Stick that could run Kodi, but the problem with Fire TV is that it has to have an internet connection, otherwise it doesn’t work (you can’t even get to Kodi!). Tethering it to my phone isn’t an option, since there are poor mobile signals in a lot of the places we visit.

Next time I’m going to be more prepared, with a more compact and flexible setup consisting of a Raspberry Pi 2 running OpenElec (and Kodi) together with a set of cables allowing me to hook it up to pretty much any TV. The Pi 2 runs Kodi really well, and the OpenElec distribution boots really quickly & has good Wifi and BlueTooth support. I initially chose a compact/travel USB-based keyboard instead of Bluetooth in case OpenElec ‘forgot’ the keyboard and I’d have nothing to navigate the menus to re-pair it.

Cable-wise, I’ve got a 1m standard HDMI cable, which will be fine in most situations.. with a 2m HDMI extension lead if I can’t get the Pi near enough to the TV (some accomodation doesn’t have power sockets where you’d expect them). I’ve also got a RCA lead, with a SCART adapter as well.. so that helps if we get stuck with an older TV.

For media storage I’ve gone with a USB3 Flash Drive with a capacity of 64Gb, which gives us more to play with than the microSD card, and it’s super-fast for copying media from a PC. As soon as you plug in the flash drive, Kodi will show it in the menus.

So that’s it.. nothing groundbreaking or overly difficult to put together. The whole system is small enough to fit in a small travel bag & gives us a lot of flexibility when dealing with different hotels/accommodation. You may just find the TV accepts the USB flash drive and can play back whatever is on it.. but at least you’ll have all the gear you need if it doesn’t ;)

After I made the video, I bought a USB numeric keyboard from eBay for a paltry £2.. that’s compacted the kit even further, allowing it to fit in an old camera bag.

The keypad isn’t instantly recognised by Kodi, but an easy way to get it up and running is to use the Keymap Add-on. Attach a normal USB keyboard and the keypad at the same time.. start the add-on and use the keyboard to activate the remap process. From there, it’s dead simple to map the keypad to the different Kodi functions.

I’m finally done with Firefox. When I first started using Firefox, the add-ons were a game-changer & I loved how much extra functionality they added to my day-to-day work.

Today, Chrome dominates the market, is waaay faster, and at the end of 2017 Mozilla is changing the add-on framework so some of the ‘classic’ add-ons I use will cease to work.

The final straw was seeing how fast Chrome way for general browsing and content creation; so much snappier than Firefox. Maybe that’s down to an ageing Firefox user profile.. but, IMO, Chrome is the future.

To ease my transition from Firefox to Chrome I’m using a bunch of extensions that give me the features I’ve grown used to. I thought I’d list out what I’m using so that others might benefit from knowing they’re out there & how useful they can be.

Adblock Plus
Blocks adds. I’d tried uBlock.. but found it breaking a bunch of sites.. so back to this one I’ve used for years in Firefox.

Akamai debug headers
Makes it simple to see what’s happening with websites fronted by the Akamai CDN.

Cookie Inspector
Enables editing + adding of Cookies (I guess one day the Chrome devs will add this into the core app.. one day).

Downloads Router
Routes certain file types to certain folders. Bit of a faff to set up, but I find it useful for filing downloads into set folders.

Fauxbar
The Chrome omnibar isn’t great for finding URLs I had open hours/days ago (Firefox was brilliant). This sorts out that problem & does a pretty good job at indexing everything nicely.

In addition to that, it gives you a neat menu bar with shortcuts to a whole bunch of things; bookmarks, extensions, apps, options, etc. The configurable tiles for sites is super-handy too.

HostAdmin App
Quick and easy host file editor.. especially useful if you’re using proxy exceptions to speed up access to certain internal sites, and want to be able to configure or toggle the entries easily.

Open IE
Adds in a context menu to open the current URL or link in other browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc). Need an external helper program installing in Windows.

Page Monitor
Monitor web pages for changes.. works best when you set the Advanced option to look at a particular part of the page using CSS selectors.

Proxy SwitchyOmega
Set up multiple proxies and easily switch between them via the toolbar button.

SimpleUndoRecents
This will give you a button where you can undo the accidental closing of a tab. (TabMixPlus did something similar in Firefox).

Tampermonkey
Lets you run scripts against web pages each time you load the page.. essentially allowing you to alter the page after it renders. Super handy for removing or adding elements to the page. This extension is the equivalent to Greasemonkey on Firefox.

The Camelizer
Nothing to do with work.. but essential all the same. Lets you see the price history for products on Amazon.. and set alerts for price fluctuations.

Xmarks Bookmark Sync
Synchronise bookmarks between multiple browsers on multiple PCs.. even has version history in case you delete bookmarks by accident.

Honorary mention..

An extension called Postman would have made this list a few months ago.. but it’s moved to a stand-alone application for Windows + Mac. It’s another essential bit of kit for developers; if you’ve not checked it out, go take a look.

MIA…

That covers all but one of the Firefox add-ons I used to use. The one I still miss is Locationbar2, which I simply can’t find an equivalent for in Chrome.

It essentially makes each part of a site’s URL a clickable link.. which is super handy for quickly moving through a site’s structure.

One of the early design decisions for the Raspberry Pi powered heating controller was to have the Pi secured behind a firewall without direct access to it from the Internet. What I decided to do was have a set of simple PHP web pages on a remote web host that you can access from anywhere, and the Pi control server talks to that web host to send/receive data.

What I didn’t want was for the Pi to run a web server that ends up getting compromised & having the run of my home network.

The Pi server and remote webspace need to be paired with an access key. Anyone accessing the remote site needs the correct access key to be able to control the system.. and the level of control is limited by the API we’ll put in place.. i.e. remote clients won’t have direct access to your internal network via an open port on your home router.

Of course, you could actually host the ‘remote’ part of this set up on your Pi and use port forwarding; the architecture allows for both types of access. The access key is still needed to control the system, but you’ll be more vulnerable to attacks on your Apache/PHP installation & need to keep up-to-date with software patches to help ensure your system is secure.

I’m going to build a home automation project which connects a Raspberry Pi to control my central heating. I wasn’t particularly happy ripping out all the existing controls, and wanted to piggyback onto them.. which helps if the Pi ever fails (I’ve still got the old controls to fall back on).

I also didn’t want to mess with the existing heating control board, so bought a duplicate unit (British Gas UP2) from eBay for about £12.. I can perfect the project on that, and install it when I’m ready.

This set of videos goes through each step of the project.. starting off with opening the control board, an overview of what I want to do, and testing out the changes.

Opening up the Control Panel

This was a bit tricky.. it wasn’t quite obvious which plastic clips needed pushing in to pull the board out.. if you were doing this on your actual panel (not an eBay-bought duplicate) then this video should help work out what you need to do to get into it without damaging anything.

Project Overview

Next up, I’ll quickly go over what I intend to do to piggyback onto the control board. There’s a project here which did exactly what I wanted to do. He’s not using a PiFace 2 like I intend to use, and he wants to be able to control the hot water as well, but everything else is the same.

Safety First – Masking off the High Voltage Area

In this second video, I’ll show how I’m masking off the high voltage area of the board to make it a bit safer when I’m testing things out. Obviously most of the time the board is off, but this helps keep things safer when it is on without the cover.

Identifying Solder Points

Luckily this blog gave me a good starting point, but it wasn’t clear where to get the status of the central heating.. I used a multimeter to find a spot which changed voltage when the system was on, and this diagram shows you what I found;

Soldering

Since I only needed 4 wires for this project (2 for the switch, and 2 for the system state), I took an old USB cable, cut the ends off, stripped the wires and soldered it to the board without much trouble.

Soldering Complete!

This shows the control board after the soldering has been completed.. it’s pretty simple soldering; the only tricky part was finding the points to connect to for the system state (on/off). I’ve stuck down some of the wires so that they don’t catch or get stuck underneath the control boards buttons.

Testing the Wiring

Now that I’ve done the soldering, I’m testing out the wiring.. seeing whether connecting the two wires for the switch turns the central heating on, and when it is on, whether we get voltage on the other two wires to indicate the system state.

Controlling from Software

I’ve now hooked it up to the Pi Face 2 board, which can be controlled with a few lines of Python to simulate a button press, and detect the state of the system.

With these basics in place, the rest of the control software can be written to do scheduling, bring in temperature readings, and allow the system to be controlled remotely.

After looking a Waze (which has speed camera alerts) I still wanted to carry on using Google Maps, but wanted to get speed/safety camera alerts. I’d also been looking at TomTom Go for Android, which looks like a good app for road warriors, but also does 50 miles for free each month & has offline maps.. handy for getting out of a tight spot when there’s no data signal!

There’s actually another app from TomTom specifically for Speed Camera alerts.. it has an overlay mode that puts a floating widget over the top of *anything* .. so that might just be your homescreen, but can also be Google Maps.. neat!

In the older version of Android I used to have a shortcut on my home sceen which would start up Google Maps in navigation mode & take me home. In the newer versions of Android, the ‘Shortcut’ feature seemed to disappear. I’ve tracked down this feature and this is where to find it;

Long-press on a free space on your home screen.. this allows you to add Apps | Widgets | Wallpapers

Choose ‘Widgets’

Scroll along and find ‘Directions’, then fill out the route information.. and that’s it!